Leonardo’s London Blockbuster: The Movie

A scene from "Leonardo Live," a film documenting a Leonardo da Vinci exhibition at the National Gallery London, experts confer on “Christ as Salvator Mundi,” which was recently attributed to Leonardo.Credit
Leonardo Live

Viewing an art exhibition on the big screen of a movie theater is not my idea of an optimal art experience. But if, like me, you wish, or even half-wish, that you had traveled to London for the blockbuster exhibition devoted to Leonardo da Vinci that recently completed its three-month, sold-out run at the National Gallery, you may find yourself doing just that, and gratefully.

The chance comes Thursday night with “Leonardo Live,” a strangely hectic, occasionally informative and sometimes even insightful high-definition tour of the National Gallery exhibition, “Leonardo da Vinci: Painter in the Court of Milan.” It will have a one-night-only showing at nearly 500 movie theaters across the United States — and at many others around the world — a slightly staggered, sort-of-collective screening that is being billed as “a first-of-its-kind cinema event.”

To some extent it is. In a time when various performing-arts organizations — operas, orchestras, and ballet and theater companies — are increasingly expanding both access and revenue by beaming live high-definition video performances into movie houses around the world (and screening not-live performances too), “Leonardo Live” may the first instance of the format being applied to an art exhibition. Thankful as I am to have an inkling of what the Leonardo show was like, I can’t say that it is entirely a promising debut.

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For the recent Leonardo show at the National Gallery in London, the museum's “Virgin of the Rocks,” right, was brought together for the first time with the version in the Louvre.Credit
The National Gallery, London

Directed by the documentary filmmaker Phil Grabsky, whose previous cultural subjects include Mozart and Beethoven, “Leonardo Live” is an 85-minute mixture of once-live coverage of the exhibition’s opening reception on Nov. 8 — punctuated by short interviews with a range of specialists and invited guests, from the curator of the show to an Anglican bishop — and segments about Leonardo’s life and the preparation for the exhibition. A somewhat shorter version was originally broadcast from the National Gallery to about 40 sold-out theaters across Britain as the reception was taking place.

The hosts of “Leonardo Live” are Mariella Frostrup, a television journalist, and Tim Marlow, an art historian and director of exhibitions at the blue-chip White Cube gallery in London. They both tend toward relentless hyperbole when it comes to Leonardo’s “divine,” “miraculous” “genius.” Similarly, they tell us too often that the exhibition is, or was, a historic, once-in-a-lifetime, never-to-be-repeated occasion. It brought together 7 of the 15 paintings generally agreed to be by Leonardo, as well as “Christ as Salvator Mundi,” a newly attributed 16th that shows its subject up close with his hand raised in blessing.

The show also included numerous drawings by the master and several works by his assistants. While the Louvre did not lend the Mona Lisa, it allowed its version of “The Virgin of the Rocks” to cross the Channel so it could hang for the first time ever in the same room as Leonardo’s second, nearly identical version of the painting, which is owned by National Gallery. The National Museum in Cracow, Poland, lent “The Lady With an Ermine,” whose precisely beautiful, almost geometric features and overly large, androgynous hand resting on the ermine’s white fur may make it Leonardo’s most dynamic painting.

Rather like runners in a relay race, Mr. Marlow and Ms. Frostrup rush guests through their mini-interviews, he in the galleries in front of individual paintings, she on a couch in the lobby overlooking the entrance to the show. What these visitors have to say is often pedestrian, but there are occasional sparks of perception.

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Phil Grabsky's documentary “Leonardo Live” takes viewers inside the National Gallery in London for its landmark Leonardo da Vinci show, a sold-out blockbuster that closed this month.Credit
Leonardo Live

The ballet dancer Deborah Bull talks about the intensity and vulnerability of the pose in Leonardo’s unfinished painting of the anguished St. Jerome shown in the desert beating himself with a stone; and the actress Fiona Shaw pinpoints the eeriness of Jesus as depicted in the “Salvator Mundi” painting when she refers to “the hovering eternity” of the image. The art historian Evelyn Welch bluntly assesses Leonardo’s tendency to leave commissions unfinished, pointing out that patrons who wanted a project completed “on time and on budget” looked elsewhere.

There are also cutaways to the various canned back stories, with shots of Milan and Florence and behind-the-scenes visits with the National Gallery’s director of conservation, who walks us through the cleaning of the museum’s version of “The Virgin and the Rocks,” which helped set the show in motion.

As Mr. Marlow explains, not even Leonardo saw both versions together. A few critics have complained that while the paintings were seen in the same gallery during the show, they were installed on opposite walls rather than side by side, which would have greatly facilitated visual comparison. In one of the highlights of the final version of his film, Mr. Grabsky finally puts the paintings next to each other.

As the camera nips back and forth from gallery to couch, with the speakers sometimes almost cut off in mid-sentence, the proceedings can bring to mind a high-art version of “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve,” especially since Mr. Marlow bears more than a passing resemblance to Ryan Seacrest. The brisk pace keeps things from dragging but can also make them feel glossed over and glib. (The film moves so quickly that it is difficult to finish reading the quotations, mostly from Vasari, that sometimes mark shifts in topic, along with portentous chapter headings and flourishes of music.)

Video

Restoring Leonardo

Larry Keith, the director of conservation at the National Gallery in London, on the restoration of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Virgin of the Rocks,” from the film “Leonardo Live.” (Video: BY Experience.)

There are several references to infrared imaging and what it tells us about Leonardo’s painting habits, but we never see any. When the portrait painter Stuart Pearson Wright notes that the show includes an ink rendering of a figure that is so contemporary it might depict a London subway rider, the drawing also is not shown. And a fairly lengthy segment about the restoration of the frame of the National Gallery’s “Virgin and the Rocks” provides no sense of what it looked like before.

In the prelude to the American screenings Mr. Grabsky told Artinfo.com, “Even if you’re lucky enough to get a ticket to the Leonardo show, you get about 18 seconds in front of a painting.” He added, “The great thing about a film is that I can focus on a detail and hold it.” (When it comes to lingering on reproductions, books are probably still better.)

The notion that viewing a painting on film is as good as, if not better than seeing it in the flesh, even in the context of a crowded exhibition, is bizarre. It is addressed early in “Leonardo Live” by one of the guests, the British artist Michael Craig-Martin, who tells Ms. Frostrup how different it is to see actual Leonardo paintings that he knows well from reproduction. The film rushes past his point, but it is worth keeping in mind.

“Leonardo Live,” which after Thursday will receive additional showings at theaters in the United States and other countries over the next two weeks, is without a doubt the next best thing to being there. (The schedule is available at leonardolivehd.com.) But the art part of the equation in this film is much, much less immediate and dominant than it is in a broadcast of an opera, ballet, concert or play viewed in a movie theater or even on television. A performance, unfolding in real time, fills most of the broadcast; commentary is relegated to the moments when the curtain is down.

As “Leonardo Live” proves, when the subject is an art exhibition, the commentary takes over, and we are swamped with fancy, sometimes illuminating window dressing. We come away with a palpable sense of what the exhibition looked like and some welcome but superficial views, via camera, of the paintings. But we haven’t come close to experiencing the art ourselves.

A version of this article appears in print on February 16, 2012, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Leonardo in London: The Movie. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe